Why Wait?
by Duck Life
Summary: "You want kids! You have always wanted kids, ever since you were a kid. And I can't have them." The disintegration of a good marriage. Spoilers for 7x1. Oneshot. Amory. Please R&R!


She's tapping anxiously on the polished wooden desk, mind whirring and stomach churning and she almost can't hear what the doctor is saying, "_Mrs. Williams, I'm sorry but…_" and it all blurs out of focus suddenly, and the noise is just a rush of nothing and she can feel her pulse in her ears, a horrible aching noise.

And then later, outside the fertility clinic, she's found a brick wall to lean on, because it's getting hard to stand up, and she's scrolling through the contacts on her phone and she finds his name, and she has her finger on the call button and she _can't_, she just _can't _tell him right now, so she skips back up to the contact before his, presses the button.

"Hello?"

And then she's talking to her daughter, and she's crying, and River is trying to comfort her over the phone, and she's still crying, because it's her daughter, and it's her only daughter, and it's the only daughter she can ever have and she is on the phone and she is still lost forever.

And Rory, that man, that unbelievable man who could do so much for her and she could not do this for him, she has to tell him, she has to, but she gets home and he's working late at the hospital, and she has never felt so alone.

She cries herself to sleep before he arrives home, cradling a picture of Melody, her baby, the only picture she will ever have, the only baby she will ever have.

Now it's morning, and breakfast, and the sun is streaking through the window, too bright, and she tells him, she tells him all she can bear to tell him and then she tells him the whole thing and by the end of it all, they're holding each other and he's late for work and _Everything is going to be okay. _

And he keeps saying it. _Everything is going to be okay. Everything is going to be okay. _And he says it over and over and over and by the time he leaves for the hospital they don't even sound like words anymore, a meaningless mantra.

So she keeps working, keeps living, keeps remembering. _Everything is going to be okay_. She ruins a photo shoot one day because she can't stop crying but _Everything is going to be okay_. And she wants to talk to someone, to anyone, but she can't talk to her husband, or her daughter, because she just feels so guilty, and she can't talk to her best friend, the man who saved her time and time again, she can't even _tell _him about this, this one thing that he cannot save her from. She can't bear to make him feel that guilty, and she knows if he knows he will feel responsible.

_Rory will come to hate me_, she realizes, theorizes, and she thinks that in thirty years' time, when they are old and childless, the man she loves more than anyone else in the space-time continuum will have learned to hate her for what she can't do.

And she still can't talk to him, not about this, and it gets to be all she can think about, and eventually they just can't talk to each other. She starts modeling more, and he starts spending more time at the hospital, and they start to pull away without even realizing it.

She goes to the hospital to pick him up for lunch one time, as a surprise, and she walks in on him playing with the kids in the pediatric ward, and he's _smiling_, smiling in a way she hasn't seen for a very long time, and she runs, she just runs the way she used to run in the TARDIS days, away from this failing marriage, this empty life, her lost child. She just runs.

When she gets home, Rory's already had dinner, and fallen asleep waiting for her, _waiting_, always waiting, and she crawls into bed and drapes her arm across his chest, and she's thinking they've never been farther apart.

And she's thinking, _He'll come to hate me in thirty years. _And she's thinking, _Why wait?_

Now they barely talk, and when they do, it's arguing, always arguing, over the littlest things- he didn't buy the right brand of milk, she forgot to turn on the dishwasher, he got tomato sauce on her jacket. They go from bickering to fighting to screaming.

And then one day it's "_I want you to go_" and he just keeps asking her why, and he's asking and he's asking, and "_Just get out of my house, Rory."_

And he's back the next day with a box, and there's this man with a box outside her front door and for the first time since the Pandorica opened, he's just a man. He's a stranger. And he's throwing t-shirts and his toothbrush into the box and he just keeps asking _Why_, and he thinks it's because she hates him and she tries to tell him, she tries so hard to tell him that she loves him, and all that comes out is "Leave your key on the counter."

The next time she sees him, he's got divorce papers in his hand. _Everything is going to be okay. _


End file.
